Opus
241 (April 29, 2009). Out of the hat this
time, we take a long fond look at that comic strip cult favorite,
Sam’s Strip, in its complete reprint incarnation from
Fantagraphics, and pause to savor other achievements of Jerry Dumas.
We also announce this year’s Pulitzer winning editoonist,
survey some current strips that are occasionally about being comic
strips (Sam’s shtick), note Schulz gift to OSU’s Cartoon
Library & Museum, review South Africa’s threat to
cartoonist Zapiro, review Incognegro,
Incognito, No Hero, and Uslan’s Spirit,
and remember Frank Springer and Jim Lange. Here’s what’s
here, by department, in order:

And
our customary reminder: don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom
Button” by clicking on the “print friendly version”
so you can print off a copy of just this installment for reading
later, at your leisure while enthroned. Without further adieu, then,
here we go—

NOUS
R US

All
the News That Gives Us Fits

ICv.2
reported in mid-April that sales of periodical comics and graphic
novels were down just 5% in the first quarter of 2009 compared to
last year’s first quarter. Considering the shambles of the
economy over-all, “where flat is the new up,” a 5% dip
might count as a profit. From another ICv2 report: “For the
first time since March of 2001, the month that ICv2 began tracking
sales of periodical comics through Diamond Comic Book Distributors,
no comic sold more than 100,000 copies in March of 2009. While sales
of periodical comics were down 7% in dollars for the month, the
decline in units sold was greater, considering the rise in cover
prices of key titles versus their cost in March, 2008.” The
decline in sales of comic books was offset by a gain of 6% in sales
of graphic novels in March. Meanwhile, in the April issue of Previews, Diamond’s
catalog, editor Marty Grosser notes that the publication has 50 fewer
pages this month than last, a decrease of 10%, a self-inflicted
wound: Previews must
“tighten its belt,” Grosser said, cutting back on product
offered in its pages and watching page counts in the catalog. But it
could be worse. In fact, the comics industry seems not to be much
affected so far by the over-all turn-down in the economy. Except, of
course, in the shops that have been adversely affected (the
economist’s mantra).

The
same issue of Previews lists several forthcoming funnybooks with Barack
Obama as the heroic protagonist. Two from
Devil’s Due Publishing: Drafted, “DDP’s original sci-fi drama returns starring Barack
Obama, and Barack the Barbarian,
which has a variant cover of “Red Sarah” Palin. IDW
offers Barack Obama: The Road to the White
House. And from Mercury Comics comes an Alex
Ross poster showing Barack Obama ripping off
his shirt in the classic Clark-Kent-to-Superman pose, disclosing
under his shirt blue tights emblazoned with a giant red “O”
the center of which is yellow. Now that the comic book industry has
discovered the market value of political celebrity, titles in this
vein threaten to become a cascade. Bluewater continues its
exploitation of famous femmes with Female
Force: Caroline Kennedy, a title conjured up,
doubtless, when Caroline Kennedy was in the running to fill Hillary
Clinton’s senate seat, but now—who cares? Then here’s
Emotional Content comics with its variation on the celebrity theme, a
180-page “biographical novel,” Mother
Theresa. I’m not quite sure whether
this next title fits onto this band wagon, but I’m sure there’s
a band wagon somewhere for it: Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies, a 320-page tome, “the
hit of the 2009 New York Comic Con, [featuring] the original text of
Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of
bone-crunching zombie action!” What’s next then? A zombie
Barack Obama?

Meanwhile,
in the “Toys, Statues, and Models” section of the
catalog, we find the “Spotllight” turned on the Barbie
50th Anniversary
Doll. Okay: that’s it. Now we know for sure: “action
figure” is just another name for “doll.”

*****

This
spring’s Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) on May 2 is the aftermath
of the debut the preceding day, Friday the 1st,
of the season’s opening volley in the superhero blockbuster
barrage, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which, sad to say,
had an unofficial debut in early April when some dastardly pirate
displayed his ill-gotten print online. Quoted by the Associated
Press, Hugh Jackman, who plays the clawful X-Man, said: “It’s
a serious crime and there’s no doubt it’s very
disappointing—I was heartbroken by it. Obviously, people are
seeing an unfinished film. It’s like a Ferrari without a paint
job.” Jackman, 40, is getting plenty of publicity lately: as a
song-and-dance man gone action-flick, he and his naked bicep have
been on the covers of Entertainment Weekly (the double summer movie special, April
24/May 1) and the Sunday newspaper supplement, Parade magazine (April 26); and as a song-and-dance
man, he emcee’d the Oscars last month, doing an entirely
creditable turn. His interview by Kevin Sessums in Parade would normally be common currency by the time
you read this, but since most Americans don’t take newspapers
anymore (or read them), you may not know that Jackman is presently
“being taught to accomplish Harry Houdini’s most daring
feats of magic so he can star in a musical based on the illusionist,
whom Jackman describes as ‘the first rock star.’”

Speaking
of Wolverine, Jackman said: “I love the idea of animalistic
chaos and following our own desires, and I think Wolverine represents
that in its most allegorical sense. He’s a man who battles
between the animal and the human, between the chaos in him and the
self-control he must have. We all deal with this to some extent. At
which point should we let go and do what we want to do, and when
should we submit to rules? Coming to terms with our true natures and
who we really are has always been a fascination to humans. I know it
fascinates me.”

The
fundamental duality in the human condition is recognized by the
School of Practical Philosophy where Jackman has been studying for 17
years. “Jackman says that the school is about ‘taking
duality and finding the underlying unity of things. Yin and yang,
sacred and profane. And, yes, animal and human.’ That dynamic
of duality in himself and his graceful way of unifying it is at the
core of his appeal,” Sessums writes. Said Jackman: “The
School of Practical Philosophy is nonconfrontational. We believe
there are many forms of Scripture. What is true is true and will
never change, whether it’s in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It’s
about oneness. Its basic philosophy is that if the Buddha and Krishna
and Jesus were all at a dinner table together, they wouldn’t be
arguing. There is an essential truth. And we are limitless.”

*****

The
new Simpsons stamps will be available nationwide on May 7, their
arrival helping, no doubt, to ease the pain of the price increase
from 42 to 44 cents. Simpsons’ creator Matt
Groening sees it differently, however. Quoted
by Georg Szalai at reuters.com, Groening said: “This is the
biggest and most adhesive honor 'The Simpsons' has ever received..”
Executive producer James Brooks added: "We are emotionally moved
by the Post Office Department's selecting us rather than making the
lazy choice of someone who has benefitted society."

The
New Yorker for April 20 included Garry
Trudeau’s parody of the self-absorbed
Twitter user in the fatuous person of one of Doonesbury’s regular cast members, Roland Hedley, "senior Twitter
correspondent for Fox News." “Hedley got every awkward
Twitter detail right,” said Noam Cohen at the New
York Times, “—the casually
dropped embarrassing personal detail; the obvious observation treated
as deep insight; the personal thought that shouldn't be shared; even
down to Hedley's annoying shout-out to his ‘tweeps,’ that
is, fellow Twitter users.” But one detail was wrong, discovered
by The New Yorker’s nefarious fact-checking department: some of the tweets were longer
than the regulation 140 characters. Trudeau, confronted by this
gaffe, felt for “the sake of clarity” he should be
granted poetic license. And Susan Morrison, who edits the Talk of the
Town section, where Trudeau's parody ran, agreed: in a contest
between fact-checking and humor, she seemed content that humor and
clarity had won out. "Sometimes fact-checking and humor pieces
yield interesting results," she said.

A
press release from the National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF)
announced that this year’s winner of the 2009 Jay
Kennedy Memorial Scholarship is Chris
Houghton, a junior at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit,
Michigan where he studies illustration. Houghton was chosen from
among 120 applicants for the award, which includes a $5,000
scholarship and a trip to the National Cartoonists Society’s
Reuben Award weekend in Los Angeles at the end of May. Houghton’s
studies have included character design for animation and writing and
illustrating his own comics. He has also submitted gag cartoons and
spot illustrations for the school’s student magazine. Aside
from his class work, Houghton has also dabbled in freelancing
including working on t-shirt and logo designs and drawing caricatures
at events. Some of his work is on display at his website, chrishoughtonart.com. The Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship is an
annual award established in memory of Jay Kennedy, the late King
Features comics editor, with an initial grant from the Hearst
Foundation/King Features Syndicate and additional generous donations
from prominent cartoonists. The scholarship is awarded to a college
student in the United States, Canada or Mexico who will be in their
Junior or Senior years of college during the following academic year.

By
way of memorializing the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High
School shootings in Colorado, Ed Stein,
formerly the editorial cartoonist at the once-upon-a-time Rocky
Mountain News, has posted his Denver
Square comic strip series about the rampage.
At his DailyCartoonist blog, Alan Gardner said: “I’m
struck with Ed’s ability to capture the sentiments running
through the community in such a powerful way.” These strips are
among the best Stein ever did; you can see the entire lot at
edsteinink.com, where Stein has also posted, in chronological order
among the strips, the editorial cartoons he did on the subject.

Calvin
Reid at publishersweekly.com listed the top ten comics sellers as of
April 14 and only two non-manga titles made the list—at first
and tenth places. Jeff Kinney’sDiary of a Wimpy Kid: Last Straw,
the third book in the series, was Number One, ahead of all other
entries in the books/comics “universe” by a “wide
margin.” “The series has sold more than 16 million copies
of the three books and Abrams just announced that the fourth book in
the series will be released in October. The new book's name, cover
art and print run will be revealed in the coming months.” In
Tenth Place is Crown of Horn, the final volume in Bone,Jeff Smith's acclaimed
fantasy and adventure saga which has sold more than 2 ½
million copies of the full-color edition. Occupying several positions
between first and tenth are various volumes of the manga series
Naruto by Mashashi Kishimoto.

A
Christian couple in Singapore, the smallest nation in the Malaysian
peninsula in Southeast Asia, were arrested January 30, 2008, and are
now on trial, charged with distributing seditious and objectionable
publications to at least two Muslims. Elena Chong of the Straits
Times reports that the couple, who attended
Berean Christian Church at the time, also face a charge of possessing
such seditious tracts Who is Allah? The
Pilgrimage, Allah Had No Son, Are Roman Catholics Christians? Why is
Mary Crying? and The
Little Bride, all comics-style pamphlets
produced by Chick Publications,
the notoriously fundamentalist Christian proselytizer. Dorothy Chan
Hien Leng, the wife, apparently also distributed the comics tracts to
twenty of her Muslim colleagues over the past 20 years. Asked by the
Deputy Public Prosecutor if the purpose of her exercise was to
convert her Muslim colleagues, she replied: “I am sowing the
Gospel seed, but it is God that converts.” Although the couple
has recently been replenishing their stock by ordering online, they
claim as their defense that they thought it was safe to distribute
those tracts as they were sold openly in Christian bookstores in
Singapore. Reporter Chong explained: “Sedition laws are meant
to ensure racial and religious harmony, and this is the first time
such a case has gone to trial. ... The prosecution asserts that the
couple knew or had reason to believe that the contents had a
seditious tendency to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility
between Christians and non-Christians in Singapore. If convicted for
sedition, they each face a fine of up to $5,000 and/or a jail term of
up to three years on each [of three] charge[s].” Under the
provisions of the country’s Undesirable Publications Act, they
could face a fine of up to $5,000 and a jail term of up to 12 months.
Possession is punishable with a fine of up to $2,000 and/or a jail
term of up to 18 months.

Ah,
the power of the comics. According to The
Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, the letter Z, in a series—e.g., ZZZZZ—has been used by
cartoonists to represent snoring for 70 years or more. “Now,”
saith a columnist in the defunct Rocky
Mountain News, “we all talk about
catching some Z’s. Presumably,” he goes on, “it’s
intended to call to mind the genteel buzzing kind of snore not the
roof-rattling thunder attributed to some males.”

OSU’s
CARTOON LIBRARY AND MUSEUM GETS BIG GRANT

Here’s
a news release from the Cartoon Library and Museum, which now
archives the entire holdings of Mort Walker’s International
Museum of Comic Art:

Jean
Schulz, Widow of Peanuts Creator Charles M. Schulz, Gives $1 Million
to Cartoon Library & Museum and Promises to Match an Additional
$2.5 Million in a “Challenge” to Others

The
Ohio State University received a gift of $1 million from Jean Schulz,
the widow of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz to support the renovation of Sullivant Hall, the future home of the
world’s most comprehensive academic research facility dedicated
to documenting printed cartoon art. Along with her generous gift,
Mrs. Schulz issued a challenge: she will provide an additional
matching gift of $2.5 million if Ohio State raises the same amount
from other sources, making the total impact of her gift $6 million.

"By
helping to underwrite a state-of-the-art facility for the
University's renowned Cartoon Library and Museum, Jean Schulz
advances the work of students, faculty, and scholars and deepens our
understanding of the importance of the genre," said Ohio State
President E. Gordon Gee. "Her gift is an especially fitting way
to honor the remarkable creative legacy of her late husband,
Charles."

Situated
at a highly visible location along High Street and adjacent to the
Wexner Center for the Arts, the historic Sullivant Hall is in dire
need of repair. The planned renovation will provide 40,000 gross
square feet of space for the new Cartoon Library and Museum that will
include a spacious reading room for researchers, three museum-quality
galleries, and expanded storage with state-of-the-art environmental
and security controls. A dedicated ground-level entry will allow for
easy access to the new facility. The addition of exhibition galleries
dedicated to cartoon art will facilitate public display of the
Library's extraordinary collection.

When
asked what inspired her to give to the Cartoon Library and Museum at
Ohio State, Jean Schulz said: “Lucy Caswell has done a
marvelous job in collecting and preserving works in the cartoon
medium. I was pleased at the opportunity to help provide a fitting
home for this important collection and to recognize her contribution
in the field.”

The
Sullivant renovation will also provide new spaces for the Department
of Dance and the Music/Dance Library, and an upgraded auditorium,
which will be used for numerous community, academic, and performance
purposes. Total renovation cost is estimated at $20.6 million, with
architectural design to take 12 months, followed by 6 months for
bidding and contracts and 24 months for construction. Due to its
outstanding reputation, growing collection and a surge of scholarly
interest in comics and cartoons, the Cartoon Library and Museum —
formerly known as the Cartoon Research Library — is a
destination location for researchers from around the world. With a
founding gift of the Milton Caniff Collection, Ohio State’s
Cartoon Library and Museum was established in 1977 in two converted
classrooms in the university’s Journalism Building. From this
small beginning, founding curator Lucy Shelton Caswell has spent more
than 30 years building the Library into the widely renowned facility
it is today. The Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State is one of
the most admired and sought-after caretakers of legacy collections.

Thousands
of donors have contributed to the collection, with gifts ranging from
one item to tens of thousands. In 1992, the Robert Roy Metz
Collection of 83,034 original cartoons by 113 cartoonists was donated
by United Media, and in 2007, the entire collection of the
International Museum of Cartoon Art (IMCA), numbering more than
200,000 originals, was transferred to the Cartoon Library and Museum.
With the addition of the IMCA’s extensive permanent collection,
the Cartoon Library and Museum now houses more than 400,000 works of
original cartoon and comics art, 35,000 books, 51,000 serial titles,
2,800 linear feet of manuscript materials, and 2.5 million comic
strip clippings and newspaper pages. Moving into its new home from
its current location, a 6,800-square-foot basement north of Mershon
Auditorium, will allow more of the Collection to be displayed and
readily accessible.

“We
are very grateful to Jean Schulz for her generous gift, and for her
challenge which will encourage everyone who cares about cartoon art
to become involved in our project,” said Caswell. “The
new Cartoon Museum and Library will be a place of learning and
enjoyment for the public and scholars alike.”

Contact:
Jane Carroll, Public Relations Manager, Development Communications,
The Ohio State University (614) 292-2550 or carroll.296 @ osu.edu

Celebrating
the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection

Beginning
June 28, the IMCA Collection will be spotlighted in two special
exhibitions at Ohio State: “From the Yellow Kid to Conan:
American Cartoons from the International Museum of Cartoon Art
Collection” (through August 7) at the Hopkins Hall Gallery and
Corridor; and “Hogarth and Beyond: Global Cartoons from the
International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection” (through August
31) at the Cartoon Library & Museum Reading Room Gallery. Kicking
off the exhibitions is a panel discussion in the Grand Lounge of the
Ohio State University Faculty Club, “Milestones of the
International Museum of Cartoon Art”; panelists are former
trustees Brian Walker, Jerry Robinson, and Arnold Roth, whose
remarks will be moderated by Jared Gardner, OSU Department of
English. After the panel presentation, Jim
Borgman, Pulitzer winning editorial
cartoonist (now retired) and co-creator of the comic strip Zits,
will give the keynote for the opening day.

UNBELIEVABLE

I
don’t believe this next item, coming in on the Web from Anorak
News somewhere in the United Kingdom. Like the infamous
Bushmiller-Beckett hoax that I innocently (while in the grip of a
spasm of naivety) promulgated a few months ago, this purported
reportage must be someone’s fiction. You gotta be kidding, I’d
say. Here it is, verbatim (and in italics):

Spider-Man
has killed his wife with radioactive sperm. Comics are taken to a new
level: so Marvel has finally gone porno. In last week's issue of the
new "dark" Spider-Man Reign, it was revealed that Spidey
killed his wife MJ with —radioactive sperm. Are they allowed to
publish drawings of radioactive sperm? Well, yes, so long as Spidey
isn't kicked in the gonads and the little chaps aren't aroused. ...
Someone named Annalee Newitz adds: “I'm very surprised that
I've not seen more online outrage about the reveal, this issue, of
what killed Mary Jane: Spider-Man's cum. And for all of you who think
I'm joking, here's the dialogue from the book itself: ‘Oh God,
I'm sorry! The doctors didn't understand how it happened! How you had
been poisoned by radioactivity! How your body slowly became riddled
with cancer! I did it. I was… I am filled with radioactive
blood. And not just blood. Every fluid. Touching me… loving
me… Loving me killed you!’

Seriously,
Marvel, WHAT THE FUCK? At what point did Spider-Man having
radioactive sperm ever seem like a good idea? At what point did
anyone even think about Spider-Man having radioactive sperm? Jesus
Christ, I can't believe this ever saw print, I cannot believe that no
one at Marvel thought that having a comic where Spider-Man tells the
corpse of his wife—because, yeah, I meant to say that, he's
talking to the corpse of his dead wife—that he killed her with
his special radioactive spider-spunk was ANYTHING that should ever be
allowed to appear in a comic. And that's before you even get to the
continuation of his admission: ‘Like a spider, crawling up
inside your body and laying a thousand eggs of cancer… I
killed you.’ Via The Savage Critic(s) and Samizdata.

RCH
again: Well, sure—someone has been thinking of this all along, just as someone has been thinking about what Superman would do to Lois Lane if they
ever actually copulated. But thinking it and talking aloud about
it—and/or writing it up as a story in a comic book (I still
don’t believe this)—are two different fixations. At
least, however, we have it all out in the open now—the Grand
Blasphemy of Superheroics, that the longjohn legions have sex lives,
no longer hovers quietly in the backroom where fanboys by the score
giggle and point. I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

AWARDS
SEASON

Steve
Breen at the San Diego Union Tribune won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, reports Shawn Moynihan at Editor
& Publisher. It’s Breen’s
second Pulitzer: he picked up his first $10,000 award in 1998 while
cartooning for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey. Breen also won both the Overseas Press Club Award and
the National Headliner Award this year. In 2007, Breen received the
Clifford K. & James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons,
distributed by the National Press Foundation. He is also the author
and illustrator of two childrens books published by Dial Books: Stick (2007) and Violet The Pilot (2008), but neither has won any awards yet, that I know of.
Pulitzer.org states that the editorial cartooning Pulitzer is
awarded for “a distinguished cartoon or portfolio of cartoons
characterized by originality, editorial effectiveness, quality of
drawing and pictorial effect, in print or online or both.” The
Pulitzer committee said Breen deserved the award because of “his
agile use of a classic style to produce wide ranging cartoons that
engage readers with power, clarity and humor.” I’m sure
the Pulitzer people think they’re honoring Breen with this sort
of gobbledegook, but they aren’t. In fact, we could say nearly
the same things about almost any editoonist now working. It’s
insulting to the cartooning profession that those who confer one of
its most prestigious awards can’t think of anything to say
about the verbal-visual achievement that marks the best editorial
cartoons. And the committee’s remarks about the two runners-up
are only barely more perceptive: the committee commended Matt
Wuerker of Politico for his “engaging
mix of art and ideas, resulting in cleverly conceived cartoons that
persuade rather than rant and that sometimes use animation to widen
their impact”—more outright balderdash that could apply
to anyone; about the work of Mike Thompson at the Detroit Free Press, the committee noted “his compelling collection of print and
animated cartoons that blend the great traditions of the craft with
new online possibilities”— that’s saying something:
at least they recognize that Thompson’s portfolio includes
animation as well as static cartooning.

I
suppose the judges spew such vacuous comments because only one of
them is a cartoonist capable of greater articulation about the
nuances of the artform—Dave Horsey of Hearst newspapers. Rick Newcombe, founder, president and CEO of
Creators Syndicate, which syndicates Breen's cartoons, was a little
more precise: "I think Steve is being recognized because, in
addition to being a great cartoonist, he frequently tackles issues
that no one else is even considering.” I don’t see enough
of Breen’s cartoons to know whether he often examines issues
others have overlooked, but his cartoons are forceful blends of words
and pictures, neither the words nor the pictures having quite the
same ridiculing impact alone that they do together—as we can
readily see from the few samples I’ve assembled here.

Breen,
who grew up in Los Angeles and drew editorial cartoons for the campus
newspaper at the University of California at Riverside, intended to
become a highschool history teacher when he was waylaid by the Asbury
Park Press. While still cartooning at
Riverside, Breen won the Scripps Howard Charles M. Schulz Award as
America’s top college cartoonist in 1991 and also received the
John Locher Award for Outstanding College Editorial Cartoonist,
doubtless attracting the attention of the New Jersey paper, which
hired him in 1994 as a “paginator” in the art department.
“It was the only position available,” Breen said, “—and
I hated it. But I was allowed to do one editorial cartoon a week.”
And by 1996, he was full-time as an editorial cartoonist; two years
later, he won his first Pulitzer.

Breen
returned to his home state in July 2001, hired by the Union
Tribune, a Copley paper like the Asbury
Park Press, after it had fired Steve Kelley
because of a miscommunication between the cartoonist and his editor;
see Opus 62 for details and Opus 65 for a follow-up. (Short version:
Kelley behaved in a thoroughly professional manner, as he had for all
twenty of his years with the Union Tribune, until his editor questioned his integrity, whereupon Kelley expressed
his understandable resentment in colorful language.) Kelley and Breen
are friends, incidentally, and were planning to collaborate on a
comic strip together until, as Kelley alleges in Opus 234, the Union
Tribune allegedly forced Breen to withdraw
from the plan.

Breen,
while continuing to do editoons for the Union
Tribune, also produces a syndicated comic
strip, Grand Avenue, which appears in 250 or so newspapers; recently, he has been assisted
by one of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, Mike
Thompson; see Opus 240.

Through
most of the history of Pulitzer awards to editorial cartoonists,
second-time winners have been rare: only relatively few cartooners
have won more than once. But four of the last seven winners have been
two-timers: David Horsey won
in 2003 and in 1999; Mike Luckovich, 2006 and 1995; Walt Handelsman, 2007
and 1997; Mike Ramirez,
2008 and 1994; then Breen. Before Horsey, we must go back another 18
years to find the previous multiple-winner, Jeff
MacNelly in 1985 (and in 1978 and 1972;
three-timers are even rarer); before MacNelly, Paul
Conrad in 1984 (and in 1971 and 1964; yeah
yeah, three-timers are still unusual). The increasing frequency of
two-time winners lately is probably a factor of the number of
full-time editorial cartoonists: as the ranks of editoonists shrink,
the number of contenders grows smaller and the likelihood that those
who remain will win more than once increases. But before we reach the
edge of the cliff to which all this seems to tend, ’twould be
nice—and wonderfully appropriate—if Steve
Sack won once: Sack is one of the great
overlooked expert editooners around. Maybe next time. Another sign of
these dismal times for journalism: the Arizona reporter who won a
Pulitzer had been laid off.

*****

The
Oregonian’sJack
Ohman won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism
Award for editorial cartooning according to a press release from the
RFK people. The judges noted: “Ohman's cartoons tackle a range
of difficult topics including poverty and unemployment in Oregon, the
practice of shuffling Oregon teachers suspected of molesting children
to other schools, rising college tuition costs, and human rights in
China. From civil rights to the election of our nation's first black
President, from ethanol to the struggles of American families in the
economic downturn, his graphic journalism on behalf of the
downtrodden exudes an insightful sensitivity.” That’s
more like it. These judges may not understand how the medium works
any better than the Pulitzer folks do, but at least they recognize
the winner’s targets. Ohman also does the best caricatures
around, as I’ve said before. The RFK Journalism Awards honor
outstanding coverage of issues that reflect Robert F. Kennedy's
concerns, including human rights, social justice and the power of
individual action in the United States and around the world.

WHEN
EDITORIAL CARTOONING MATTERS

—Then
the Livelihood of the Cartoonist May Be at Risk

With
five wives and 20 children, Jacob Zuma, who, within days, will become
the third president of South Africa since black majority rule began
in 1994, is the first “real African” to ascend to the
job. His predecessors, Nelson Mandela, a lawyer, and Thabo Mbeki,
educated in England, wore suits, day in, day out; Zuma often wears
traditional Zulu finery—leopard skin, headdress and spear—on
the special occasions of high honor to which he is entitled as
president of the African National Congress, Mendela’s party.
But wardrobe may not be the only change Zuma will initiate. Mendela,
whose election ended apartheid in the country, achieved international
fame through his policies of reconciliation rather than retribution;
Zuma may well revert to what has been too often in the history of
African nations policies of vindictiveness and self-aggrandizement. Newsweek (April 27)
noted the sad history: “The continent is littered with the
wreckage of countries that were driven into the ground by similarly
charismatic postcolonial leaders in the name of revolutionary
justice.”

The
somewhat rotund and glisteningly bald-headed Zuma, by all reports
“extremely intelligent” despite a lack of formal
education, fits the ominous bill: he is popular but controversial,
and an aura of corruption and ignorance clings to him. He has a long
history of dedication to the cause of African rule: an early activist
in the ANC, Zuma spent 10 years in prison on Robben Island where
Mandela was also incarcerated; and 10 years ago, Zuma played “a
vital role in ending the virtual civil war between ANC” and an
opposition party. But he will inherit a reeling economy,
crime-ravaged cities, and the nation’s ongoing AIDS crisis.
Three years ago, he was acquitted of charges of rape but during the
trial displayed a shocking lack of understanding about the disease
that is wracking his country: the woman in the case was HIV-positive,
and Zuma, once head of the National AIDS Council, didn’t wear a
condom but claimed he had reduced the risk of infection by taking a
shower after their tryst. Just two weeks before Election Day, the
attorney general dropped at least 14 charges of fraud, racketeering
and corruption that were arrayed against the candidate—“not
because the case was weak,” Newsweek reported, “but, the prosecutor
announced, merely because the filing of charges had come to appear
politically motivated.”

At
the end of March, Justice Malala, writing in The
Times’ “Monday Morning Matters,”
said: “There was never any doubt in my mind that the Zuma-led
ANC would stop at nothing to let Zuma off. Perhaps no one was more
correct and prescient than the cartoonist Zapiro when he depicted
Zuma and his cronies raping the justice system. This is what he
meant. He was right then and he is right now.”

Many
assume Zuma is guilty as charged but voted for him anyway. Others,
including cartoonist Jonathan “Zapiro”
Shapiro, accuse Zuma of wanting to undermine
the independence of the judiciary. Zuma, meanwhile, persists in an
effort to silence his most visible critic—the man who draws
those damned cartoons. Zuma has filed two law suits against Zapiro,
one for the cartoon depicting him preparing to rape mother justice on
the eve of one of his court appearances last year, the other relating
to the rape trial. Zapiro, however, is undaunted, and routinely
portrays Zuma with a shower head protruding from his forehead, a
visual reminder of his rape trial testimony.

Quoted
in The Guardian,
Zapiro said: "Under apartheid, cartoons I did and newspapers I
worked for were banned. But I've had a tremendous amount of freedom
in the past 15 years to publish cartoons that other cartoonists and
editors from around the world have told me they would struggle to get
published, even in democratic societies.”

Zapiro’s
shower head cartoons have become a popular and much imitated running
joke that infuriates Zuma. Said Zapiro: “I always think of Steve Bell [of The
Guardian] and his cartoons of [British Prime
Minister] John Major wearing his underpants outside his trousers.
When I first put the shower on Zuma's head, I didn't think of it as a
permanent fixture. But it had a very positive response and I decided
to keep it there. I'm amazed that it's been talked about in high
circles."

South
Africa’s most prominent satirist, Pieter-Dirk Uys, “challenged
Zuma to drop his lawsuits, saying Zuma, as the nation’s
president, will have a duty to uphold the constitutional right of
free speech”—which includes satire and political
cartoons. But an ANC spokeswoman said Zuma was entitled to continue
his suit against the cartoonist: “The other side of freedom of
speech is the dignity of the human being,” she said, describing
one of the cartoons as “very undignified and insulting to
women.”

At
last report, ominously enough, Zapiro’s satirical puppet show
was cancelled by the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation).
There are fears that a Zuma presidency could threaten press freedom.
A recent ANC plan for a media appeals tribunal provoked an outcry
from editors. The SABC promised its Special Assignment strand would
look at the state of political satire and ask: "Is a slow,
chilling effect taking hold of political humor in South Africa?"
But Zapiro’s show remains cancelled—for legal reasons.
And on May 9 or thereabouts, the ANC, which will hold a majority of
seats in South Africa’s parliament, will choose one of its own
to be the country’s president—without question, the
choice will be Jacob Zuma. Whither, then, Zapiro?

Fascinating
Footnit. Much of the news retailed in the
foregoing (and following) segment is culled from articles eventually
indexed at rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics
Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael
Rhode and John Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips,
animation, caricature, cartoons, bandes
dessinees and related topics. It also
provides links to numerous other sites that delve deeply into
cartooning topics. Three other sites laden with cartooning news and
lore are Mark Evanier’s povonline.com, Alan Gardner’s
DailyCartoonist.com, and Tom Spurgeon’s comicsreporter.com. And
then there’s Mike Rhode’s ComicsDC blog,
comicsdc.blogspot.com For delving into the history of our beloved
medium, you can’t go wrong by visiting Allan Holtz’s
strippersguide.blogspot.com, where Allan regularly posts rare
findings from his forays into the vast reaches of newspaper microfilm
files hither and yon.

EDITOONERY

Afflicting
the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted

The
latest casualty among editorial cartoonists is the president of the
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), Ted
Rall, our favorite bomb-thrower. In addition
to drawing several editorial cartoons a week, Rall also writes a
subversive (and intelligent) column for syndication, and since 2006,
when he was hired by Scripps’ United Media, he has worked three
days a week as the syndicate’s Editor of Acquisitions and
Development, and Scripps has been lopping off staff and newspapers
(the Rocky Mountain News among them) with merciless profit-preservation efficiency these days.
Now, apparently, it’s United Media’s turn to give up
staff to the accountants. Even though United Media turned a whopping
$30.9 million profit in the last quarter of 2008—up 20% from
the previous year—it would not be spared the pruning that all
Scripps enterprises must, it seems, undergo. Rall was one of eight
syndicate staff laid off in mid-April. Rall, as always, is
philosophical about it, saying to cohorts that it would not have
copesetic for him to stay employed while so many of his flock,
members of AAEC, were joining the ranks of the unemployed.

While
with the syndicate, Rall was responsible for signing up the comic
strips The Knight Life by Keith Knight, Family
Tree by Signe
Wilkinson,Rip
Haywire by Dan
Thompson,Secret Asian
Man by Tak Toyoshima, Minimum Security"
by Stephanie McMillan, Matt Bors' editorial cartoons, and several other features of which he was
justifiably proud. With his cartoons and columns, books and
animations, Rall said he’d survive the loss of income, but
he’ll miss most “the opportunity to reshape the comics
and other pages with material that was less conventional.”

*****

Editorial
cartoonist Milt Priggee,
who deftly wields the juiciest brush in the business and who has been
flailing around without a regular gig for some years now, is joining
the Web-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
seattlepi.com. The resident editoonist, David
Horsey, blogged the announcement on April 15:
"Milt's work life has taken a more rugged path than mine,"
Horsey wrote. "I've been lucky enough to have a string of
editors and publishers who understood their job was to defend me, not
censor me. Milt, unfortunately, has had the opposite experience. Now,
however, he's found a place where he can say anything he pleases.”
Priggee’s earliest work appeared in Chicago newspapers, then in
1982, he joined the Journal Herald in
Dayton, Ohio, and when that paper folded in 1986, he went to the Spokesman-Review in
Spokane, Wash., in 1987. That paper, in an early cost-cutting flinch,
cut Priggee, who began self-syndicating from his home in Oak Harbor,
Wash. Examples of his superior art and unflinching wit, both static
and animated, can be seen at miltpriggee.com.

IRKS
& CROTCHETS

Watchmen’s creator, the irrepressible Alan Moore, told
Adam Rogers at wired.com that his purpose with Watchmen was to shatter the myth of the American superhero. Ironically, Moore
observes, it ended up introducing a new myth—the superpowered
psychotic who wreaks revenge on a cruel society. “With Watchmen,” he
said, “we were talking very much about the potential abuses of
this kind of masked vigilante justice, but that was not meant
approvingly. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness
[in superheroes]. I’m not a particularly dark individual. I
have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor.”

Hermes
Press has announced that it will collect the complete run of daily
and Sunday The Phantom newspaper
strips, beginning in September with The
Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies: Volume One 1936-1938 (320 9x12-inch pages, b/w; landscape format, $39.99). This volume
will include a 16-page color section with an introduction by comics
historian Ron Goulart.
The full project will collect over 70 years of The
Phantom, from the first Lee
Falk and Ray Moore strips to the Sy Barry strips from 1994. ... Topps will release later this year a set of trading cards devoted to “the
world’s biggest hoaxes, hoodwinks, and bamboozles,” said
Fortune.com, featuring, among the mob, Bernard Madoff, Charles Ponzi
and Enron.

Wonder
Woman: The Ultimate Guide to the Amazon Princess (146 10x12-inch pages, color throughout; hardcover, published in 2003
at $24.99) by Scott Beatty,
an erstwhile English teacher turned comic book writer (Batgirl:
Year One, Robin: Year One), is a trifle as
history but a nice scrapbook of spectacular pictures by some of
Wonder Woman’s notable illuminators, who, oddly, are scarcely
noticed by name throughout. A Brit named Roger
Stewart is credited as “illustrator”
of the book, but most of the pictures are by others, and I can find
his name nowhere except on the back flap of the book’s jacket.
I bought this book because (1) Borders was selling it for $4.99 and
(2) a cursory glance through it revealed a section purporting to be a
“Timeline” of WW’s adventures from Sensation
Comics No. 1, where she debuted in 1941,
through Wonder Woman No. 200 in 2004. The pictures littering the book’s giant-sized
pages are the chief attaction; as “history,” the focus is
on WW, the character as biography—what she did, when, and with
whom. A few of Adam Hughes’ renderings are evident, including the cover illustration, but the
book was published before the Dodsons began their stunning renditions of the Amazon Princess, and Alex
Ross is around for only one or two paintings.
In short, the “history” here isn’t about the people
who created Wonder Woman through her 60-odd year run. William
Moulton Marston is mentioned but not his
rationale for creating a female superhero; and the man who first drew
the character, Harry G. Peters,
whose awkward depictions defined Wonder Woman’s appearance for
a decade, gets lumped in an alphabetical roll call of scores of
artists and writers, thanking them “for their contributions to
this book,” a nearly perverse way of giving credit where credit
is due. John Byrne is
treated in about the same off-hand manner, his re-design of the
Amazing Amazonian’s costume ignored or overlooked altogether.
Until Bryne came along to reveal WW’s thigh all the way up to
her waist in the modern manner of female swim suits, the character’s
costume was a stodgy star-spangled foundation garment, more turn-off
than turn-on. And the controversy that exploded when the top of WW’s
fighting togs was re-designed, eliminating the eagle in favor of the
double double-U, is wholly absent from this so-called “history.”
But at Borders’ $4.99, you can doubtless afford to add these
pretty pictures to your shelf. Giving myself the last word on the
subject, here are a few of my own pictorial comments on the
adventures of Wonder Woman’s costume.

Persiflage
and Badinage

“In
a conversation, remember that you’re more interested in what
you’re saying than anyone else.”—Andy Rooney

“Laugh
at yourself first, before anyone else can.”—Elsa Maxwell

“Three
o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want
to do.” —Jean Paul Sartre

“If
a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when the New
York Times prints it, it's a sociological
study.”—Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the NY
Times
“Forgive your enemies, but
never forget their names.” —John F. Kennedy

“When
eating Peeps, bite the head off the first one and replace it in the
package for 15 minutes so that the others may know their fate.”
—John Mayer, via Twitter

“You
never think you’re the age you are, and, as long as you don‘t
look in the mirror, you aren’t.”—Frank Gehry

Sam’s
Strip

A
CULT FAVORITE EMERGES INTO THE BRIGHT LIGHT OF REPRINTAGE

I
didn’t witness any of Sam’s Strip during its maiden voyage, October 16, 1961 - June 1, 1963. I was on a
voyage of my own at the time, bounding over the heaving main (and
vice versa) while serving in Uncle Sam’s (no relation) navy. I
spent the entire 20 months of Sam’s initial run aboard the USS Saratoga, touring
the Mediterranean Sea, and we didn’t get daily newspapers while
at sea. No Sam’s Strip, no Steve Canyon, no On
Stage. No Beetle
Bailey. It’s a wonder we survived at
all. More than a decade after the strip’s demise, I first saw a
few of the daily releases and promptly, forthwith, joined the
cult—that feverish band of comics cognoscenti who knew enough
about the annals of the medium to relish every nuanced historical
allusion that creators Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas were able to insinuate so fondly
into this comic strip about being a comic strip. Eventually, I ran
across a modest paperback volume, more pamphlet than book, Sam’s
Strip Lives! that reprinted some of best of
the strip, but now I own it all: Fantagraphics has reprinted the
complete run of Sam’s Strip (208 8x9-inch landscape pages in b/w, 3 strips to a page; paperback,
$22.99), a handsome volume that embellishes the reprinted strips with
introductory remarks by Walker and by Dumas, an assortment of
behind-the-scenes material, unpublished sketches, and photographs as
well as annotations by Brian Walker, who
explains 1960s references that are now long forgotten, and commentary
by Dumas.

Sam’s
Strip, in case you have been completely at
sea or somehow else managed to avoid running into it ere now, is a
comic strip about the comic strip that Sam owns and operates—and
inhabits. He and his assistant, who has no name, go about the daily
business of putting on their comic strip, tinkering with sundry comic
strip equipage—speech balloons, punctuation marks, speed lines
and smoke puffs; and characters from other comic strips—some
contemporary, some antiques—drop in from time to time. The
strip studiously, consistently, broke the “fourth wall”:
Sam is conscious the whole time of being a comic strip character in
his own comic strip, and he talks with us about it.

At
the time Walker and Dumas conceived the strip, Dumas had been working
with Walker for five-and-a-half years, writing gags for Beetle
Bailey and Hi and Lois and assisting with the drawing and lettering.
Once a week, they convened for the express purpose of selecting gags
for the two strips. Each of them brought ten gags to the meeting, and
out of the twenty candidates, they picked the fourteen that would be
produced in final form for syndication. Invariably, then as now, some
of the gags were too off-beat, too hip—too “inside”
the profession (and sometimes even too naughty)—for
publication. Walker and Dumas had a fairly thorough nodding
acquaintance of comic strip history, so sometimes the gags were about
comic strip characters from other strips.

“We
quickly saw how much fun it was to have comic characters from other
strips, other times, interact with each other,” Dumas writes in
one of this book’s introductory essays. “The idea soon
came up: what about having a guy who ran his own comic strip as a
business? Mort, who enjoyed alliteration as much as anyone (Beetle
Bailey, Sergeant Snorkel) came up with the name—Sam’s
Strip.”

Once
the strip got going, Dumas continues, “Mort and I split the gag
writing, and I did all the drawing, except for the lettering, which
Mort did, just as I did the lettering for Beetle.”
In those days before copying machines were perfected, Dumas drew
everything in the strip, including the characters who wandered in
from other venues, and he mimicked the drawing mannerisms of the
cartoonists and artists whose characters were making these cameo
appearances—Chic Young for Blondie and Dagwood, George McManus
for Jiggs, George Herriman for Krazy Kat and Ignatz, and, most
spectacularly, John Tenniel when characters from Alice
in Wonderland dropped by. The research took
time, and Dumas “took pride in copying another artist’s
work exactly.” But he enjoyed the work: “During its brief
existence, Sam’s Strip gave Mort and me deep satisfaction,” Dumas said, “and if
anybody didn’t like it, that was all right, and if anybody, on
the other hand, really liked it, that was all right too.”

Last
December, I went to Stamford, Connecticut on assignment for The
Comics Journal and interviewed Mort Walker in
his studio for a couple of days, staying overnight in the “guest
house” on the premises. The interview, one of those “career
spanning” epics the Journal likes, appears in the current issue of the magazine, No. 297. Among
the things Mort talked about was Sam’s
Strip; to wit (in italics):

Now,
that started with drawings that we were just messing around with—the
artist, Jerry, and I. When I went down to sell it to King Features,
and I told them that what I was going to do was to make fun of other
comics cartoonists, they said, “Don’t we have to get
permission for that? That’s not going to work. We can’t
do this strip.”

I
said, “No, you don’t. You don’t have to get
permission. This is satire.” I said, “We’re just
going to have fun. We’re not going to make anybody mad.”

They
argued with me, and finally they just said, “Well, OK, if you
want to do it, go ahead.” But I don’t think they ever had
any enthusiasm for it. It’s interesting how often I’ve
been met with this criticism, and then they just go do their job,
which is to sell it. Sam’s Strip was extremely popular among the cartoonists. They really liked it. It
appeared in a New York paper, and they all saw it.

It
never really had wide circulation [it
appeared, at most, in 60 newspapers], but we
enjoyed it so much, and we had such a good time doing it, that we
wanted to go on doing it. But then, when the New York paper pulled
it, when the Journal-American pulled it, and it didn’t appear in New York anymore, we noticed
that it just wasn’t fun. We didn’t get the comments or
the feedback, so we just decided to end it all. I think it was five,
ten years later that the editor from there at NEA called up, and they
wanted to do it. That’s when I went to talk to the president at
King. He said, “No, we don’t want you to go to another
syndicate. But if you want to revive that strip, do it in a different
way, don’t do the same satire.” So that’s when we
created Sam and Silo.[Starting April 18, 1977, Sam
and Silo featured the characters from Sam’s
Strip, Sam’s assistant acquiring a name
this time. But in this strip, they aren’t proprietors of their
own strip; they’re just characters in a strip—Sam is the
sheriff of a small town, and Silo is his would-be deputy.]

I
laughed and said, “The Laurel and Hardy of the comics.”

That’s
exactly what we talked about, Mort continued
[in italics still]. And it’s still
going. For 26 years. I enjoy Jerry’s drawings so much. He fools
around and he does more than he needs to do, but it makes it
beautiful. Every now and then, he gets inspired to do a nice city
scene with trees and rocks and stuff like that. He gets a big kick
out of it. The thing is, it’s not very widely syndicated, but
boy, in Greenwich where he lives—they run it there. He’s
the big chief in Greenwich. They think he’s the greatest artist
in the world. Then they gave him a column to write, and he’s a
cartoonist and a columnist for that paper. The column comes out once
a week. It’s very popular.

Here’s
a gallery of Sam’s Strip.
The strip acquired its cult fame through the years mostly because of
the guest appearances in it of characters from other strips and
times, but the fun of being a comic strip about being a comic strip
was much more broadly based than that, as most of these examples
show.

In
the back of the book, Jerry Dumas annotates some of the strips on
display in this gallery, exhibiting his customary convivial,
easy-going conversational prose as well as insights into the ways
comic strips are made and the lore that clusters around that making;
here are a couple of his commentaries (in italics):

This
strip [April 30, 1962],
with all the comic characters arriving for “International
Comics Week,” is probably the most famous of all the strips. It
has been used on invitations, greeting cards, stationery, t-shirts,
and other clothing. This may be the only strip where I drew Thurber’s
characters (the man and woman on the extreme left and the seal on top
of the sign). The seal is from Thurber’s famous “I
thought I heard a seal bark” cartoon, which shows a man and
wife in bed, and a seal on top of the headboard. Thurber had been
trying to draw a seal on a rock, but the rock turned out to look more
like a bed’s headboard, and that’s how this gag came to
be.

A
cartoonist once barged into the founding editor’s office at The
New Yorker and asked Harold Ross: “How
can you reject my stuff while you publish the work of a fifth-rate
cartoonist like James Thurber?”

“Third-rate,”
Ross defended.

****

[In
the strip for January 30, 1962] Sam reads a
note from a reader who asks, “What kind of pants do you wear?”
and Sam’s sidekick (now named Silo in Sam
and Silo) replies, “These are comic
strip pants.” This is the sort of gag that was the foundation
of the strip, and the kind we would have liked to do every day. As
time went on, we probably would have been able to continue with
variations, but it wasn’t easy day by day, week by week. When
we resorted to more conventional gags, even gags about the Cold War
and political cartoon figures, the strip didn’t seem to me to
be as interesting. Incidentally, the drawing of the car in the second
panel isn’t very good. As with the sidekick’s head,
compared to Silo’s head forty years later, the construction of
the car is not as solid, as interesting, as in later years. Drawing
is a very personal thing. ... In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s,when
I inked Beetle Bailey, I liked to pencil the static background areas of the strip by using [the straight-edge of] a triangle to make straight lines for things like windows, doorways,
floor lines, steps, but then ink those penciled straight lines
freehand to give the look of a panel a more relaxed feeling. That’s
why the tires on the Sam and Silo car look the way they do.

*****

RCH
again: One of the days I was in the vicinity, Mort took me to lunch
with his sons and a couple friends, including his long-time
collaborator, Jerry Dumas, who still writes gags for Beetle
Bailey while also writing and drawing Sam
and Silo. I’ve admired Dumas’
work on his strip for a long time: sometimes he produces visual
symphonies of texture and shading just for the sheer fun of it—that
is, neither the gag nor the pictures conveying it require the
embellishment he so happily lavishes, sometimes, on the strip.

A week or so after our lunch conversation, Dumas
wrote me (in italics, forthwith):

Even
Mort and I can’t believe how long we’ve been together.
Just think, I’ve been writing Beetle gags for all but the first five-and-a-half
years of its existence. We started working and playing ping pong
together when he was 33, and now he’s 85. We had ferocious
games in the basement after lunch each day—he was good—and
I would spray sweat all over my side of the table and some of his,
and I would go through several shirts and t-shirts. Mort would joke
that I was the only cartoonist he knew who went to work each day
carrying several changes of clothing. This was true, but one of his
inaccurate memories is when he claims that I never took up golf
because the first time I played, in a big cartoonist gathering, I got
the booby prize for the worst round of the day, and I was so angry I
sore never to play again. The real reason, of course, was because I
was already a champion four-wall handball player and would soon be
Connecticut state champ (twice) and New England champ (once), and it
was the game I loved, and there wasn’t time to do everything. A
handball match takes about two hours, and I would lose up to six
pounds, while golf took six hours and you gained two pounds.

Did
Mort tell you this one? Early on, I wasn’t making that much
money, but I had managed to invest, all by myself, astutely in the
stock market, and had built it up to where my holdings were worth a
considerable sum. All blue chip stocks. Then a so-called stockbroker
friend convinced me to put the whole thing into one stock that was
going to go through the roof. It turned out that the chairman and
president [of that company] were crooks, and the stock fell through
the basement. One day I complained to Mort that I didn’t know
how it could have been fraudulent because, after all, the company’s
accountants were considered the best in the country—Ernst &
Ernst. Without looking up from his drawing, Mort said, “Well,
Ernst is okay, but Ernst is a crook.”

The
humor in that line has to do with the exact wording. I’ve heard
other people try to tell the story by saying, “... but the
other Ernst is a crook.” And that, of course, screws it up.

The
column I write is published every Thursday in our daily paper, Greenwich Times.
Nobody in town talks to me anymore about Beetle or Sam and Silo, but they talk all time about the column, strangely. I can write about
anything I want, and it can be humorous, poignant, topical,
historical—anything. A few times I’ve been able to make
readers laugh and cry during the same 500-700 words, which is
satisfying. I just hope they weren’t crying at the funny bits
and laugh at the tearful parts.

[Dumas
writes articles other than the column for the local newspaper, and
he’s produced two books, one of them a long narrative poem
about three generations of his family.—RCH] If
I had to choose, I’d pick writing over drawing. I’ve been
happiest seeing my stuff published in The
Atlantic, The New Yorker and especially Smithsonian (they
bought a great many pieces). I had appeared in Smithsonian’s pages for several years before I realized their circulation (then
over 2,000,000) was a great deal more than the other two esteemed
publications.

I
do all my reading in bed between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., for some unknown
reason. It doesn’t bother my wife: if I’m quietly turning
pages, it means I’m not loudly snoring.

*****

Like
most humorists by occupation, Jerry has a finely-tuned professional
sense of humor, of what’s funny and why, as his story about
Ernst & Ernst demonstrates. With his letter, he sent along these
two versions of the same gag in Andy Capp,
with educational annotation.

Subsequently,
I ran across one of Jerry’s columns for the Greenwich
Times; here it is (not in italics) (well,
here and there maybe, but not everywhere):

The
Bailouts Seem to Be Almost Comical

By
Jerry Dumas, Greenwich Times Columnist;
posted: 03/19/2009

President
Barack Obama and his top economic aides frantically tried to calm a
nationwide furor over bonuses paid by comic strip syndicates to a
handful of famous comic strip cartoonists. "Yes, we've known
about the bonuses for months," said a government official who
spoke anonymously, since he worked for the Department of Agriculture
and actually had zero knowledge of the facts.

The
news broke only weeks after the third government bailout of the comic
strip industry, bailouts which now total $15 billion. Mr. Obama
ordered the Treasury Department to "pursue every legal avenue to
block all bonuses to cartoonists, especially bonuses paid to
cartoonists doing strips that aren't even funny."

"And
never were funny," added Vice President Joe Biden, speaking for
the record. "There is absolutely no reason to reward cartoonists
who can't even tell a joke, never mind think up brand new jokes. I
tell jokes all the time, and I don't get a bonus."

"They
can't even draw, most of them," said a Biden aide, who spoke
anonymously since he has had no art training and was therefore not
qualified to speak for the office of the vice president.

"What
happened to the billions in bailout money we sent to the comic strip
syndicates?" wondered President Obama. "They won't tell us.
And now the cartoonists, half of whose gags we don't even get, get
bonuses? This is an outrage."

A
comic strip syndicate CEO, who refused to be identified because he is
not qualified to be a syndicate CEO, pointed out that it was unfair
of the government to criticize, since several comic strips are not
intended to be funny. "You take Prince
Valiant or Rex Morgan or Doonesbury,"
he said. "Their purpose is not to make readers laugh, even if
they do appear in what we call the comics section. Their purpose is
to enlighten the public as to the secret, behind-the-scenes lives of
knights and dragons, doctors, politicians and all those other Doonesbury characters.
Anyway," he continued, "those bonuses to cartoonists were
written into their contracts long before we got any taxpayer bailout
money from the Treasury, and we syndicates are known for standing by
our word, legally speaking."

Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates responded, "Are you aware that, having
provided $15 billion in taxpayer assistance to keep the comic strip
profession afloat, the government now owns nearly 80 percent of the
business? And there hasn't been one funny new strip since Little
Lulu."

"Wait
a second," interjected a Defense Department aide, who claimed he
used to discuss the subject endlessly with former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. "How about Calvin and
Hobbes, and The Far
Side? They were good."

"Yes,"
agreed Vice President Biden, who showed a surprising grasp of comics
history, "but they had a short shelf life. Each of them only
lasted 10 years. They are sorely missed. But one thing they didn't
need, popular as they were, is bonus money."

"Let's
get back to the point," said Mr. Obama. "Why should the
American taxpayer shell out billions to support comic strips that are
now printed so small we can hardly read the words or see the
pictures? Who knows? There may be some good ones."

Attempts
to contact cartoonists were unsuccessful, since the ones with money
were traveling and were unavailable.

*****

And
with that, we’ll leave Sam’s
Strip, Sam and Silo, and Jerry Dumas to
plunge with both feet into—

NEWSPAPER
COMICS PAGE VIGIL

The
Bump and Grind of Daily Stripping

Maybe Sam’s Strip wasn’t
the first comic strip to be self-conscious about being a comic
strip—probably others did it occasionally. But these days, the
fourth wall is often breached in comic strips and cartoons as their
creators toy with their medium in much the same way that Mort Walker
and Jerry Dumas did over 40 years ago. Here’s a bunch of
examples.

Incidentally,
on the back cover of Sam’s Strip Lives! “Walker and Dumas once said that if there were ever to be a
comeback [of Sam’s Strip], they already had a new title ready.
It was to be called Son of Sam’s Strip. For a while, they also thought it might be interesting to slip Sam
into Beetle Bailey as
a new private; but they wisely foresaw that in no time at all he
would have advanced himself in rank and taken over the strip.”

Badinage
and Bagatelles

We
wear clothing in the winter to keep warm; in the summer, to cover the
sweaty parts of the body. This is a mistake as any physicist can tell
us. In the winter, clothing does its job: it keeps us warm, protects
our epidemises from assaults by bitter chill winds. But in the
summer, we would be more comfortable if our bodily fluids—i.e.,
perspiration—were permitted access to the air around us because
only in that way can sweat perform its most basic function, which is
to cool us off. —RCH (maybe; maybe not)

Two
items culled from Leland Gregory’s Stupid
American History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and
Mythconceptions:

Legendary
Wild West gunman Bat Masterson [William Barclay Masterson, 1853-1921]
has long enjoyed the reputation as a gun-slinging killer, reportedly
gunning down twenty-seven foes, “but according to Robert
DeArment’s thoroughly researached biography, he is credited
with killing only one person.” Masterson spent the last years
of his life as a sportswriter in New York.

Shooting
Blanks. It is common knowledge that the
military purposely puts saltpeter in the food of enlisted men to curb their sexual appetite. It’s
well know, all right—but it’s a well-known falsehood.
There’s no proof that potassium nitrate (known as saltpeter)
has any effect on the libido, one way or the other. One theory as to
why this rumor started is simply because the name saltpeter sounds like it might have some negative effect on a service member.

That
last item is worth quoting solely for the concluding double
entendre, seems to me.

GRAFFIX
NOVELIX

Mat
Johnson’s tantalizing Incognegro (136 7x9-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $19.99) takes its title from the
pen name used by the book’s protagonist, Zane Pinchback, an
African American newspaper reporter who is so fair-skinned he can
pass for white, which is what he does when he goes into the Deep
South to report first-hand on lynchings and other racial strife early
in the fourth decade of the 20th century. Johnson takes this much of his fiction from actual fact: the
fatefully named Walter White, “Mr. NAACP,” executive
secretary of the organization from 1931 until his death in 1955, was
another pale African American (with blue eyes and blond hair!) who
would go “undercover, posing as a white man in the Deep South
to investigate lynchings.” The book’s title evokes the
author’s own childhood. Johnson, who is a fair-skinned African
American, has twins, one of whom is “brown-skinned with black
Afro hair, the other with the palest of pink skins and more European
curly hair,” and their birth prompted their father to recall a
childhood game, “going Incognegro” that he played with a
cousin, “pretending to be race spies in the war against white
supremacy.” When Zane Pinchback goes undercover in this book,
however, he’s not playing when he pretends to be white; and he
desperately wants to do more than report on a lynching. The black man
in jail this time is his own brother—his twin brother,
Alonzo—and Zane wants to prove him innocent of the murder he is
falsely accused of committing. That’s the setup. To venture
further into the thicket of Johnson’s mystery would be to
reveal one or more of the wholly unexpected snags that encumber this
unusual and expertly convoluted yarn. Incognegro twists more than any pretzel in the bag, and every turn extends the
narrative in another direction, each more bizarre than the last, each
giving the suspense more of the torque that drives us to the end. And
the end is another entirely unanticipated event—immensely
satisfying, delightful even, in a perversely gratifying way, and
deftly satiric about the hypocrisies of race in America.

Warren
Pleece draws Johnson’s tale, and his
pictures are thoroughly adequate but not particularly remarkable
stylistically. He deploys juicy solid blacks effectively without
recourse to hachering or shading, a technique that imparts a stark
realism to the proceedings, but his supple line fails him in
delineating faces. Cartoonists and artists who tell stories with
pictures must draw the same faces over and over again, every time
recognizably—an odd sort of challenge when you think about it,
and one not often thought about, I ween, but a challenge that must be
met—and Pleece, although he performs well enough for most
narrative purposes, doesn’t quite make it every time he tries.
Close enough most of the time, but not with the black-and-white verve
of, say, Alex Kotzky or his son Brian, both
of whom limned the comic strip Apartment 3-G with such panache for so long. Pleece’s untextured manner also
makes the rustic setting of the tale a little too clean and
uncluttered, and for the rendering of 1930s automobiles, he seems to
have resorted to European models. Still, the visuals are, for the
most part, attractive, and his storytelling—page layouts and
pacing and panel composition—tells Johnson’s story in a
way only this medium can.

CIVILIZATION’S
LAST OUTPOST

One
of a kind beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.

In
2006, the Columbia Journalism Review noted (and The Week quoted), the world produced 161 “exabytes” of digital
information—3 million times the amount of information contained
in all the books ever written. Next year, the world will produce 988
exabytes of data. I know who’s producing all this
information—bloggers everywhere—but who’s counting
it all? And the “information contained in all the books ever
written”? In a frenzy of statistical reportage, The
Week also quotes the Washington
Post, which said: “There are now 3.3
billion active cell phones throughout the world—one for very
two people on the planet.”

The
scream you hear when a live lobster is dropped into boiling water may
be merely air escaping from its insides, but the creature nonetheless
feels the pain of being boiled to death according to a new study
performed on hermit crabs in Northern Ireland. If Irish crustaceans
feel pain, it doesn’t surprise me than lobsters everywhere do.

In
the same issue of The Week (April 17), my steady diet of reading some weeks, we learn that
50-year-old Barbie is a big hit with Chinese women—that is,
adult females, not juveniles—who see the statuesque doll as a
symbol of the lifestyle to which they aspire. And Mattel, the shapely
toy’s manufacturer, is making a big push to sell to this eager
consumer group, opening a six-story Barbie store in Shanghai, which
has been mobbed ever since.

Before
we work ourselves into a high torque swivet about the greed and
brutality of Somali pirates, gloating in the deserved death of three
of them by sniper fire lately, we should remember that the pirates
are mostly young fishermen—teenagers, really—who
originally discovered piracy as a career while attempting to strike
back at Europeans who had invaded their fishing grounds, stealing
their fish and dumping nuclear waste. Or so it sez here.

Charisse
Jones in USA Today reports
that condom sales are up an impressive 6 percent from last year, as,
presumably, the economic implosion forces “millions of
cash-strapped Americans to entertain themselves at home.” The
Week, my favorite periodical compendium of
data of this sort, also noted that, “after Indonesia and Japan,
the United States is the most volcano-rich nation on Earth.
Currently, the U.S. Geological Survey lists 169 geologically active
volcanoes in the country and its territories, most of them in Alaska,
Hawaii, the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest, and California.”
The article was offered by way of explaining why Barack Obama’s
stimulus bill included $140 million for “volcano monitoring.”
Louisiana’s governor Bobby Jindal, the GOP’s unfortunate
pick to represent the party in commenting on Obama’s speech,
ridiculed this budget item as an example of wasteful spending; but
then, Louisiana has no volcanoes. Besides, he overstated the amount:
$140 million is the amount earmarked for all projects conducted by
the Geological Survey; of that, only about $15 million is for
monitoring volcanoes. I can’t say—or won’t—whether
there’s any relationship between condoms and volcanoes.

FUNNYBOOK
FAN FARE

Four-color
Frolics in Pulp

An
admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as
will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while
provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must
avoid being too mysterious or cryptic. And, thirdly, it should
introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that
makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a
complete “episode”—that is, something should
happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the
issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger
aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

Incognito is the incarnation of writer Ed Brubaker’s fond dream of returning comics to their pulp roots, where, often, the
protagonists were characters of questionable origin and dubious
motives—Doc Savage, the Spider and their ilk. Hence, Zack
Overkill, the surviving half of a twin crime wave, whose brother was
killed or died, effectively taking the fun out of the game, so Zack
apparently turned state’s evidence and is now in the witness
protection program, but he can’t help putting on the mask again
every once in a while and rampaging the streets at night, beating up
petty criminals and other bad asses. Zack is not a likeable guy even
though, in the first issue, he foils an attempted rape, making
himself admirable in the perverse manner that pervades his persona.
He and his brother, orphans, were given superpowers by a mad
scientist; what, exactly, those powers are we aren’t told, and
the resultant curiosity will bring me back for No. 2. Zack is clearly
unhappy, discontented, and at loose ends, looking for something to
do. What, we’ll eventually find out. The cliffhanger in this
issue is supplied by the mad scientist, who, as the issue closes,
realizes that Zack, whom he’d thought dead, is still around,
and so—. Sean Phillips,
who has been working with Brubaker on their Criminal series, supplies the art—deeply but evocatively shadowed,
lending grit to the underbelly of the crime scene herein.

No
Hero is another Warren
Ellis book illustrated in the copiously
detailed manner that the writer, or Avatar’s publisher, William
Christensen, or his creative director, Mark Seifert, seem to prefer:
every wrinkle is painstakingly drawn, every strand of hair likewise,
ditto every whisker on a chin needing a shave, every cigarette butt
on the street, every pebble, discarded beer can, spit and scum of all
sorts—in this book, by Juan Jose Ryp. Ellis offers this series as a twisted answer to the question: who
wants to be a superhero? In No. 0, the first issue, we meet Carrick
Masterson, who has invented a way to create superheroes and, with a
band of his creations called Front Line, now undertakes to reform the
world and civilization as we know it, inaugurating what he promises
to be an era of justice and humane living. His instruments are the
superheroes he invents, who have not, quite yet, realized the painful
consequences of their decisions to become superheroes. Nobody in this
introductory issue is likeable, but the gore into which one of
Masterson’s creations has dissolved and the pain of one of his
alums creates sufficient morbid curiosity to propel us into the next
issue, No. 1. Without Ryp’s compulsively detailed depiction of
globules of blood and bits of brain and gristle, we would doubtless
be less curious: there’s something perversely compelling about
gore in detail. In No. 1, a young man named Josh Carver auditions for
membership in Masterson’s menage, for superhero powers. What
horrors await?

*****

Will
Eisner’s Spirit, like Fawcett’s
Captain Marvel (by C.C. Beck mostly), belongs to the ages: neither character can be successfully
reincarnated by modern amanuenses seeking to mimic the Master. Yet
both characters are condemned to their present mediocre afterlifes by
hopeful publishers who tirelessly try to revive the iconic creations
but inevitably fail to produce anything other than painfully
inadequate imitations who merely look like their inspirations. The
magic that enveloped and animated the originals is always,
invariably, missing. Some imitations get closer than others,
admittedly; but none of the new crop have ever quite managed the
miracle of cloning an exact copy. Michael
Uslan, who has made a career out of following
in the footsteps of the masters, is the latest to try his hand at the
Spirit.

Assisted
by F.J. DeSanto, Uslan cranks up a story that pits the Spirit against
both Silken Floss and the Octopus—his lost love from high
school (college?) and the most nefarious of his criminal nemeses,
who, as always, shows up only as a pair of purple gloves protruding
from the sleeves of a purple business suit. The brilliant physicist
Silken Floss acquired her college degree thanks to the Octopus, who
paid her way through school. And now, he wants pay-back: he has
obtained Nazi notebooks about their research into a biochemical
weapon of mass destruction, and he wants Silken Floss to decipher the
notes and produce the weapon. Police commissioner Dolan sets the
Spirit the task of foiling the scheme. Without much difficulty, the
Spirit tracks Silken Floss to her lab and tries to persuade her to
give up the Octopus’s assignment: he almost discloses his Denny
Colt identity, thinking if she knew who he was—namely, the love
of her youth—she would accept his sincerity and the
authenticity of his knowledge about the Octopus’s criminal
intent. But just as he reaches to pull his mask off, Ellen Dolan, the
true love of his mature years, shows up and a cat fight between Ellen
and Silken ensues. The Spirit, who the Octopus has decked earlier, is
prone on the floor most of the fight. In the end, Silken Floss
leaves, promising to use her scientific skill to prevent her
benefactor from using the Nazi knowledge for anything except
antidotes for chemical weapons, not weapons.

Uslan
includes several dollops of purely cute stuff. The splash page, a
device for which Eisner is renowned, takes place in a coffee house
(“Storebuck’s”) where the signs ostensibly
announcing various condiments and specials actually bear the names
and functions of the writers, artists, colorists, and editors. The
chairman of Silken Floss’s physics department is Willis Rensie,
a pen name Eisner often employed. A schooner anchored in the harbor
is named “Blackhawk” and the password to get aboard is
“Chop Chop,” an allusion to the Chinese comic relief in
the Blackhawk comics
invented by Eisner. But I’m getting a little weary of this
century’s would-be Spirit writers conjuring up the Octopus at
every opportunity. True, the Octopus was a repeat offender in
Eisner’s Spirit; and he never actually appeared except for his purple-gloved hand.
Mysteriousness. What with all the repeat offenders showing up so
regularly in other venues—Penguin, the Joker, Two-face et al in
Batbooks; the Kingpin in Daredevil; Lex Luthor in Superman, and on
and on—I suppose everyone thinks the Octopus is another of the
so-called “classic” villains of funnybooks. Eisner
conjured up the Octopus a dozen or so times, but the character,
despite his mysteriousness, is scarcely an encore personage of the
Joker’s stature. Why keep bringing him in? Fanboy fascination,
I reckon.

And
harkening back to Denny Colt’s youthful dalliances with Silken
Floss, Silk Satin, and others of the femme ilk in the series is
another fond surrender to the thralldom of Eisner’s Spirit. The
Spirit’s past came back to haunt him every once in a while, but
not as often as we keep seeing it nowadays. Sheesh.

These,
however, may be the merest of quibbles. The story itself is a
somewhat lame enterprise; that’s not a fault, however: lots of
Eisner’s stories were somewhat lame. At least Uslan’s
Spirit, as in most Eisner ventures, is the butt of the story’s
jokes and is thoroughly victimized by the women in the tale—true,
that is, to the “spirit” of the character. The limping
plot is invigorated by the comedy throughout although the Spirit may
be a little too witty in his flip remarks on the passing action. But
the “bar scene” is a genuine hoot: everyone promptly, on
cue, recognizes the Spirit through his disguise, and they all gang up
on him, beating him to a pulp in two pages of rampant violence.
Later, the cat fight between Ellen and Silken goes a bit too long and
deteriorates suddenly when the women start trading “fat ass”
quips, a gag that Uslan makes us gag over again in the closing scene
between Ellen and the Spirit.

The
book is apparently illustrated in separate compartments by the two
artists credited in Storebuck’s. Or maybe the style of
rendering just shifts noticeably after the opening sequence, which
concerns the youthful love affair between Denny Colt and Silken
Floss. Once the narrative leaves this flashback and plunges into the
present, the style changes from a cleanly rendered realism to an
angular more comedic abstraction that incorporates various quirky
shorthand anatomical mannerisms. I’m chagrined to admit that I
don’t recognize the style of either artist, so I’m just
guessing that Justiniano did the first pages and Walden Wong the last
pages. Both compartments are well done although the abstract stylings
of the last pages sometimes annoy—when Ellen’s skirt, for
instance, becomes the geometric shape of a skirt, suggesting “skirt”
successfully but not indicating that there’s a body underneath.
Here’s a sample of what I mean.

Despite
the in-group cutenesses and the cliched reliance upon threadbare plot
devices (the Octopus, young Denny’s love affair), the book is
successful largely because of the sense of humor infecting it. And
that bar scene alone is worth the price of admission.

SON
OF CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST

One
of a kind beats everything. —Dennis Miller adv.

In
Russia, surgeons operated on a man for what they thought was a
malignant tumor in his chest but found and removed a 3-inch-tall fir
tree, growing in his lung. According to The
Week (April 24), doctors think the man may
have inhaled a seed. ... On the same page in the same magazine is
this: An Illinois man whose wife has been charged with beating her
2-year-old niece to death says the police insulted Islam by releasing
her mug shot. The problem is that the cops took a photo of his wife
without her traditional Muslim headscarf in place. Police, said the
man, are “really going to be in big trouble” for
violating her modesty.

USA
Today reports that since 1976, there has been
in the U.S. an average of 18 mass murders every year in which gunmen
kill four or more people. Nearly 3,000 have died in such bloodbaths.
Regretfully, I have come to the conclusion that more restrictive gun
laws won’t remedy the problem. For one thing, the Constitution
clearly permits people to own guns; to accommodate both the Second
Amendment and the desire for greater safety in a gun-totin’
nation, any law enacted would be too general to have much effect.
Moreover, no law is effective if the people charged with enforcing it
overlook some revealing data—as they did in the case of the
Virginia Tech slaughter a year or so ago. If the existing laws and
regulations had been adhered to in that situation, presumably the
murders would have been prevented. Given, then, what I perceive as
the impossibility of achieving the goal of a nation free of murders
by gun, we will doubtless gradually assume that mass murders of this
kind are like natural phenomena, disasters like tornadoes that can’t
be controlled or regulated but that must be, simply, endured, however
sadly, however regretably. As Mike Littwin in the Denver
Post wrote: “When you have volatile,
unstable people, things like this are bound to happen, in much the
way that volcanoes must eventually blow open a hole in the side of
the mountain.” Littwin was not advocating the kind of unholy
acceptance that I think is inevitable: he was being sarcastic,
bemoaning our lack of resolve to find a solution. Alas, I think we
cannot find a solution; so we will come, eventually, to accept the
random bloodshed. In fact, we have pretty much arrived there.

MERRY
BELATED XMAS

Hogan’s
Alley’s anyule gift to its readers was
a collection of Christmas card art by Roy
Doty, who has been a freelance cartoonist
since early in the modern era. Doty, who is fond of saying that he’s
never had a job—“I’m a freelance cartoonist”—has
drawn a Christmas card to send to friends and colleagues every year
since 1946. An array of them, “masterpieces of intricate
design,” is on display at http://www.cagle.com/hogan/features/christmas_cards_2008/main.asp.
Interivewed by an HA minion just before Christmas, Doty said: “When I did my first
card in l946, the year I started freelancing in New York, all the
artists did their own cards at Christmas. It was a tradition to do
so. Over the years fewer and fewer cartoonists do them, though there
has been more of them lately now that they can print them out from
their computers.” Doty’s mailing list keeps growing. “I
guess most of the people on my original list are dead now,” he
said, “but new friends and clients grow every year. One of the
problems is both a sad and a joyful one. Many cartoonists die, and
before the next Christmas I get a letter from their widows that
they'd like to be kept on the list. I love that—then the widows
have passed on, and I get requests from their children to keep them
on the list. So it grows and grows. This year's list is just over the
500 mark, and I'm an old fashioned type: I still address them by hand
like my mother told me to do with Christmas cards. Printing and
postage are killing me, but it's a wonderful feeling. One of the joys
of Christmas. I wouldn't dream of not doing a card in the coming
year! Even if I only had a mailing list of twenty or so, I'd do a new
one. Why should I give Hallmark more money? They never gave me any.”

Farrago
of Persiflage and Badinage

Here
are a few concocted (or discovered) by Jason Love, writing in Humor
Times:

No
man is an island, but many are that large.

The
upside to dying is that you don’t have to go to work the next
day.

Don’t
count your chickens before they’re all in one basket.

The
best part about gay men is that they’re not always trying to
prove that they’re not gay.

You
just think it’s all in your head.

The
average American attention span is ...

Give
a man a fish, and he’ll eat for one day. Teach a man to fist,
and he’ll stink for the rest of his life.

Remember
that you are totally unique just like everyone else.

WE’RE
ALL BROTHERS, AND WE’RE ONLY PASSIN’ THROUGH

Sometimes
happy, sometimes blue,

But
I’m so glad I ran into you---

We’re
all brothers, and we’re only passin’ through.

Frank
Springer is dead. He died April 2 at his home
in Damariscotta, Maine, of prostate cancer, reported Jennifer Barrios
at Newsday. I enjoyed
knowing Frank. I saw him only at the annual Reuben Weekends of the
National Cartoonists Society, and we always talked. I can see him
now—in one of the many cocktail hours, standing at the edge of
a cluster of other cartoonists, glass in his hand, head thrown back,
big grin on his face, talking, punctuating his remarks with drawled
“ahhhh’s” to give himself time to think of what
he’d say next. In our conversations, what he’d say next
was invariably in answer to some question I’d posed about Milton Caniff or George Wunder.

Frank
looked a lot like Steve Canyon, which is the sort of thing you might
say as a compliment to someone whose early career was connected to a
Milton Caniff creation—a film “negative” of Steve
Canyon, that is—square out-thrust jaw, of course, but the
clincher was that instead of a black streak in blonde hair, Frank had
a white streak in dark hair. As he grew older, the dark hair turned
gray, almost white, and the streak in his hair disappeared into the
surroundings. My questions were usually about Frank’s
sojourn with Wunder, Caniff’s successor on Terry
and the Pirates, whom Frank assisted for 5-6
years. Among the tidbits he divulged: although it is widely supposed,
and often claimed, that Wunder won a hotly contested competition
among many cartoonists to take over Terry, Frank said Wunder told him there was only one contestant—George
Wunder. Perhaps there would have been more if Wunder hadn’t
done so well on his try-out. He was given two successive Terry Sunday strips by Caniff and told to write and draw the intervening
week’s dailies.

To
his son Jon, quoted by Barrios, Frank was “a gregarious and
practical man who labored for hours a day in his backyard studio.
He'd be out there basically all day long, morning until dinnertime,”
listening to jazz and opera while he worked. He never got too
high-minded about his outstanding talent, his son said: "He was
a normal, conservative kind of guy.”

Frank
was a freelancer all his life-long career, moving from one assignment
to the next—sometimes in advertising, sometimes helping on
someone else’s syndicated strip, sometimes doing a comic book
for DC or Marvel. "There were some raggedy times,” he told
Mark Evanier during a panel at the 2004 San Diego Comic Con, “but
I always had work, raised five kids, bought some houses, bought some
cars—I've been lucky."

Springer
was born in Queens, New York, on December 6, 1929, Evanier reports at
newsfromme.com. He graduated Syracuse University with a degree in art
in 1952 and went into the army while the Korean War was in its last
throes. Stationed at Fort Dix, Springer drew maps and illustrations
until his discharge in 1954 when he began assisting Wunder. He left
Wunder in 1960, embarking on the comic book illustrating phase of his
career. “He later recalled Brain Boy,
a Dell comic, as his first assignment,” Evanier said, adding:
“He drew many books for Dell including Charlie
Chan, Ghost Stories and Toka, Jungle King. He also began drawing for
DC and later, Marvel. Fans recall his byline on the DC series, The
Secret Six, and for a time on Marvel's Nick
Fury, Agent of SHIELD and later on many
Spider-Man titles and Dazzler.
He also did a lot of uncredited work, including a few Batman tales
under the ‘Bob Kane’ signature.” He wandered in and
out of the syndicated comic strips industry, helping Wunder again and
working uncredited on several years of Rex
Morgan, M.D., plus ghosting on The
Heart of Juliet Jones, On Stage, Friday Foster, The Phantom and
others. Evanier says Springer originated other strips of his own, but
my favorite is the mock soap opera strip, The
Virtue of Vera Valiant.

Written
by Stan Lee, Vera Valiant plunged its hapless heroine in and out of the frying pan daily and
Sunday, from 1976 until it ceased in 1977: one day’s
emotionally fraught cliff-hanger would be solved the next day only to
degenerate immediately into another dire dilemma for the ever hapless
Vera, as you can see from the excerpts posted at the end of this
remembrance. Frank’s deft touch in limning faces added
pictorial variety and emotional heft to Lee’s breathless and
nearly brainless plots.

According
to his son, Frank was proudest of an adult satirical strip called The
Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist that he
produced with writer Michael O’Donoghue. Starting in 1964, Phoebe ran serially in
the Evergreen Review,
an avant garde magazine of the day, the episodes subsequently
collected in a hardback volume published by Grove Press in 1968. The
chief object of the ridicule in the strip was cliff-hanging fiction.
Phoebe, who dies at least once during the series but is revived a
chapter or so later, is a beautiful, shapely and wealthy 24-year-old
debutante, who at a cocktail party “in the midst of society’s
notables, surrounded by scores of liveried footmen, sips what appears
to be a perfectly ordinary pousse-café,” which is
obviously drugged. She falls unconscious and “comes to, scant
hours later, at an oasis in Death Valley, California, the prisoner of
a portentous stranger,” an ex-Nazi “wearing a faded blue
and olive Luftwaffe uniform.” He strips her naked, whips her,
and ties her by the wrists to a helicopter, which takes off, heading
for the LaBrea tar pits into which Phoebe is supposed to be deposited
for the rest of eternity. En route, however, a blind Tibetan archer
sends an arrow skyward and severs the cord binding Phoebe to the
helicopter, and she plunges into the sea below. She is rescued but
never recovers any clothing: for the rest of her harrowing
adventures, all thirteen fevered chapters worth, she is thoroughly
unencumbered by any raiment whatsoever.

Later
on, O’Donoghue became an editor at National
Lampoon, Evanier reports, summoning Springer,
who drew many of the magazine’s parodies thereafter, “to
great acclaim.”

Springer’s
art was rendered with a supple line and superior draughtsmanship,
recognizable by its sheer graphic panache. Anyone who can ghost for Stan Drake and/or Leonard Starr is a
consummate artist, as you can doubtless readily tell from the gallery
posted below. The National Cartoonists Society recognized his
achievement by awarding him its plaque as Best Comic Book Artist
three times—1973, 1977, and 1981. Springer served as NCS
president 1995-97 and was a founder of the Society’s Long
Island chapter, the Berndt Toast Club (named in honor of Walter
Berndt, creator of the comic strip Smitty).

"Very
few people could surpass him as an artist, as a gentleman, and as a
true gentleman in my field," said Stan
Goldberg, who draws Archie comics. "When
you see a Frank Springer job, you know it's going to be the best job
in the world."

I’ll
miss Frank—his head tilted back, teeth flashing in a big grin,
drawling “aahhh” before liberating his next remark.

Here
are some excerpts from Vera Valiant,
displaying Springer’s deft hand at drawing faces with a variety
of expressions while still making the characters look like themselves
in every instance, and a few pages from Phoebe
Zeit-Geist, including one set in a saloon in
the Orient, evoking the Terry and the Pirates locale with which, presumably, Springer was intimately familiar. And
if you think the situations and dialogue in Vera are over the top, you might remember that Stan Lee, in one of his
earlier incarnations, wrote the My Friend Irma comic book.

*****

Jim
Lange, whose entire 58-year-long career as an
editorial cartoonist was spent at The
Oklahoman, died on April 16 at the age of 82.
Lange had been forced, kicking and clawing, into retirement the
preceding October. Then on February 3, he fell and was taken to the
hospital, where he spent about 9 weeks in and out of ICU, said his
daughter, Cheryl, in an e-mail to Lange’s friends and
colleagues. Several of his vertebrae were crushed or damaged in the
fall, she reported, and he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, an
infection usually fatal. His family brought him home to hospice a few
days before he died.

“Jim
Lange was not only one of the greatest political cartoonists Oklahoma
ever produced, he was one of the most outstanding cartoonists in the
history of American journalism," said David Boren, University of
Oklahoma president, quoted at newsok.com. "Jim had the
remarkable ability to produce cartoons that were fully understood by
the public and expressed the feelings of rank and file Americans. He
truly loved this state and our country, and those patriotic feelings
were constantly communicated through his work. His life's work was a
gift to all of us, and I will personally miss his friendship and
wonderful sense of humor."

Lange
was born August 15, 1926 in Winnebago, Minnesota, but he grew up in
Dubuque, Iowa. After service in the Army Air Corps during World War
II, he was eligible for GI Bill benefits, and he used them at the
Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He languished through a variety of
“temporary, adventurous jobs” until he met Helen
Johnstone, who told him she wouldn’t marry him until he had a
real job. Lange promptly began researching for newspapers that had no
staff editorial cartoonist, and when he found The
Oklahoman, he wrote the publisher, owner E.K.
Gaylord, who hired the young man. Lange began work on October 1,
1950.

For
most of his career at The Oklahoman,
the longest tenure of any journalist in the history of the newspaper,
Lange drew seven cartoons a week. At his retirement, he was only
doing five. (“Only”!) No one, not even Lange, knew
exactly how many cartoons he had published over his career, but it
probably exceeded 19,000. Very early, his cartoons were readily
identifiable by his habit of scattering oil wells around the scenery.
Apart from caricatured politicians, national as well as state,
Lange’s most frequently appearing character was the traditional
“John Q. Public,” a forlorn-looking representative of the
puzzled and down-trodden tax-paying ordinary citizen, always in a
shapeless fedora. And Lange stuck to the tried-and-true tools of his
trade, too: his most advanced technology was a black felt-tip pen and
poster board. “Occasionally,” the paper’s obit
reported, “he would whip out a pen and draft an idea on a handy
napkin.”

Lange
usually produced several sketches every day for his editor to
approve. Lange made his final drawing of the one the editor picked.
He once said in an interview that the newspaper's executives rarely
told him what to draw: his political philosophy was close enough to
theirs that he knew what they wanted.

Lange
was a charter member of the American Association of Editorial
Cartoonists (AAEC) and served a term as president during the 1980s.
His work was frequently included in the annual publication, Best
Editorial Cartoons of the Year. A collection
of his best work was published by The
Oklahoman in the 1990s, and Lange was
inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 1993. Here’s
the balance of The Oklahoman article
remembering Lange (in italics):

His
images helped put public issues in perspective, or helped readers
express emotions about events that affected them. Lange punctured the
posturings of many famous people; he insulted, scolded or ridiculed
them when he thought it necessary. He also praised them when he
deemed it appropriate. He didn't dislike anybody, he said once; he
just didn't agree with some. Politicians and elected officials who
appeared in his drawings were not always pleased with him. In a 2000
interview on his 50th anniversary on the job, Lange said that the
worst thing someone in his line of work could do to a politician,
except ignore him completely, was to laugh at him. Often, his
subjects called as soon as the paper was delivered in the mornings to
request the original sketch, no matter how insulting it was. Lange
was a natural entertainer and storyteller. With drawing pad and pen
for props, he performed for banquets, club meetings, conventions and
fairs across the state. When he told jokes, he laughed more heartily
and with more delight than his audience. In the 2000 interview, Lange
responded to a question about why he hadn't retired when the
appropriate age arrived. He said his job was just too good to leave.

Here’s
a quick look at some of his cartoons, many of which feature ol’
John Q. Public. Startling, isn’t it, how current these issues
seem even though the cartoons were drawn in the 1970s and 1990s.

ONWARD,
THE SPREADING PUNDITRY

The
Thing of It Is ...

I
haven’t been lambasting Baracko Bama as I did GeeDubya, and
that’s because I think Obama is doing all right. No, he doesn’t
walk on water. Yes, he’s just another politician, and he
sometimes bends the truth (or, rather, avoids mentioning it), but
there’s nothing sinister about his behavior: he doesn’t
want to subvert the nation’s political system, as GeeDubya and
Darth Cheney aspired to—creating a Republican Ruling Class in
Perpetuity, with the Prez the Supreme and Unquestioned Leader
Forever. I agree with David Broder, who, as the Obama administration
approached its Magic 100 Days benchmark, wrote: “Barack Obama
has launched a lot of schemes, but has fulfilled few of them. What he
has shown—and it is an important accomplishment in itself—is
a mastery of the art of managing the presidency. It is important
because it is the first and most basic test of his ultimate ability
to be a successful president. And it is surprising because there was
no reason to assume that he had the skills to direct such a large
enterprise. ... The campaign itself was by far his largest
organizational challenge, and he passed with flying colors. The
presidency poses far tougher tests. ... but the White House staff has
supported what so far has been a bravura performance on Obama’s
part. Particularly striking has been the staff’s ability to
move at a rapid pace to tackle inherited challenges and launch
ambitious initiatives without creating a sense of confusion about the
essential priorities of the new president.” So we’ll wait
and see some more here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer.

As
for the shameless Grand Old Pachyderm, I don’t need to do any
lambasting whatsoever as along as John Boehner is around—which
he is, whenever Rush Limberger isn’t—singing the same old
one-note ditty: don’t spend money to create jobs for people;
give it all to the wealthy so they can create businesses that will,
eventually, create jobs for people. Maybe. If, that is, there are any
people left who haven’t starved to death while waiting for
businesses to form and create those jobs.

According
to Faux News, the ever-reliable fair and balanced newspaper “aspiring
to the high standards set by cable news” (published in Humor
Times, April 2009), the GOP has retracted its
erstwhile motto, “Country First,” in favor of a new
strategy, outlined by Boehner: “In our effort to come up with a
unified plan going forward,” he said, “we decided to
replace the now-irrelevant motto with our new one, ‘Failure IS
An Option.’ It’s a new day, and a new challenge for the
party,” he continued, “and we must convey our message to
the American people clearly. The new slogan says to America, ‘Yes,
we can fail,
and it’s okay.’” He went on to maintain that
“failing is the best way to succeed” in this new
political climate (sounding like an echo of Karl Rove), insisting
that “by failing now, the nation will see that Democrats suck,
and that there is no choice but to return to Republican rule, no
matter how distasteful it may seem.”

*****

In
the backwash of financial recovery, we have only Keyesian economic
theory to thank. Spending money is the solution. It stimulates more
spending, and, hence, revolving around and around, Wall Street and
Main Street recover. Writes Jonathan Chait in The
New Republic: “Keynes proposed burying
money in mineshafts so that workers would be hired to dig it out.
World War II was an effective stimulus that, economically speaking,
consisted of 100 percent waste. If war hadn’t broken out, we
could have enjoyed the same economic benefit by building all those
tanks and planes and dumping them into the ocean.”

According
to the aforementioned Faux News, O’Bama is taking this tact to
its logical conclusion: give each American $1 million tax-free to
invest or spend as they see fit. Obama and his advisors “discovered
that the main reason for the current financial recession is that
Americans don’t have enough money. By giving them more money,
Obama believes this will stimulate the economy and lead to greater
prosperity.”

You
can’t make up stuff like this. Well, actually, you can. And we
did, with the considerable chutzpah of Faux News.

*****

Finally—and
this’ll make you feel better—we have one of Clay
Bennett’s cartoons, which is more words
than pictures but is no less brilliant. The pictures are all of a
hand-held calculator with totals showing. The captions that explain
the totals read as follows: “If you spend a million dollars a
day ... every single day since Jesus was born ... you still wouldn’t
have spent as much ... as Congress did in the Stimulus Bill. ... Now
let’s quadruple that amount ... and we’ll have the cost
of the Iraq War.” Happily puts these matters into a proper
perspective, one we can all enjoy.